Tuesday, July 27, 2010

sing me to sleep

My brain often refuses to power down at night, leaving me physically exhausted but mentally preoccupied. Usually, I'm just scrolling through everything I need to get done and coming up with new ideas to torture myself with overwork. People, I need new project and/or research ideas like a hole in the head.

Sometimes, though, I can't stop thinking about my day and all the bits I wish I could rewind and rerecord: missed opportunities to tweak a piece of writing before sending it off, something I should have said in a conversation, a moment I should have stopped to enjoy for bit before rushing off, a lecture I didn't attend, an invitation I didn't accept, a photograph I didn't take. I'm secretly a perfectionist, I guess--just too lazy to realize perfection.

But every once in a while, the odds and ends floating through my fatigued mind are just random memories. Tonight's sample:

1. During my first year of community college, I took trigonometry from a teacher who pronounced the letter W as dub-ah-yuh. And W was often a variable in our problems.

2. A fairly irrational paranoia that I'll lose all my teeth.

3. Where is my passport? Oh, right. Don't forget to pack the passport!

4. Can I justify the cost of a ticket to Way Out West? Can I really go to Göteborg during the festival and NOT get a ticket?

5. There's a book on the hold shelf for me at work.

6. Whatever happened to my white jeans?

Insomnia is not new to me. When I was about fourteen, I used to listen to my cassette tape of Louder Than Bombs every night to put myself to sleep. Man, I was obsessed with the Smiths. My first bedtime album was their debut, but I always had to listen to it about three times through before I'd drift off. LTB is way longer, with the bonus of ending in the track "Asleep." Think it would work for me again, a couple of decades later?

2 comments:

You don't even know how long I've been waiting for this.....a Kaijsa blog post! The ebb and flow of posting, I hear ya. One of my pharmacology professors pronounced the letter v as "wee"....so everytime he said IV, he said "I wee"...needless to say, my 13 year old boy brain thought that was super hilarious, every time...